When the news of hackers being able to remotely kill a Jeep Cherokee while it was driving down the road came to light by the folks at WIRED, it was some pretty scary information. Imagine driving down the road and losing all access to dashboard functions, steering, transmission, and brakes. Once the news was out, understandably, there was plenty of discussion in the CrackBerry Forums surrounding the hack and how it could possibly be related to QNX, despite there being not even a single mention of QNX in WIRED’s original article and most of it related to Uconnect, the infotainment system Fiat Chrysler cars, SUVs, and trucks.
Still, that didn’t stop many outlets from directly relating QNX to the hack. During the BlackBerry Security Summit in July, BlackBerry offered up comments on the matter to CBCKW891 reporter, Andrea Bellemare, which noted ‘The system uses QNX Neutrino OS, but there’s no evidence to suggest that the exploit described by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek is based on an OS vulnerability’. Most recently, an article titled ‘BlackBerry: The Class Action Lawsuit Resulting From The ‘Jeep Hack Could Negatively Impact QNX Sales’ appeared on Seeking Alpha and caught the attention of BlackBerry, which has now spoken out against the article through their #BBFactCheck Portal.
